A milestone has passed in the BentProp saga. In today's progress
report, Flip has confessed to - some might even say bragged
about - doing
"an adult thing."

From Flip:

I have a confession. But
please don't tell anyone. I did an adult thing today. Instead of
going diving and putting off work for the project, I elected not to get
wet and did all of the
things I said I would put off. I realized if I did not seek out all the
permissions for permits
for our work, if I did not get the Internet hooked up, if I did not track
down someone from
the ship in the flyer photo, all of this would be put off for another day
which means until
next week since the weekend is upon us.

So Paul went out and finished his certification at German Channel. Warren
and Molly
went out to Blue Hole and New Drop Off. They all were beaming when I
got back to the
hotel. I think they're hooked. I know I'm hooked but as I said, I did
a mature thing
today.

I started the day with Joe making phone calls to various government offices
for me.
Paving the way so to speak. Then I went back to the hotel and made
some more phone
calls. In no particular order, I wanted to visit with the U.S. Embassy,
President's Office,
Airai State Office, Ngatpang State Office, Koror State Office, Palau
National
Communications Office, Palau National Aviation Administration Office,
CAT Team
Compound (Civic Action Team, U.S. Air Force currently), buy gas, send
an update, stop
at Conservation Office, connect to the Internet somewhere and finally
contact someone
on the Navy ship in the harbor.

I managed to visit every office except the conservation group. Every
permit we need is
started. I drove from the harbor to the capitol and back. Managed
to update my
Palauan pilot's license, have a bowl of udong, personally clog up
the Internet pipe to a
crawl and meet a lot of helpful and nice Palauan Government employees.
We'll finish
up the permit process tomorrow and Monday, we should have some Internet
service in
the room by the same timeframe and we might be conducting some get
togethers with
some Navy DIvers.

As you know, things happen around the BentProp Project that are just
too coincidental
to be a coincidence. There is a Navy salvage vessel in the harbor.
I heard they're here
for training and they pulled up an old and very heavy anchor. We
can see them work
from the windows of our hotel rooms. The ship and team are here
for a bit longer. Now
what are the odds that I would know anyone on this particular ship?
If you've followed
our story, you know the answer is 100%. As it turns out, almost
all of the Navy Divers
on board have worked on the B24 recovery operation and the Chief
Warrant Officer in
charge is a good friend of The BentProp Project. We'll have lots
to talk about. What
were the chances of this vessel with this crew being in Palau at
that exact time we are?
And what are the chances that we'll run into them tonight?

We're heading to the airport to pick up Pat, Mark, Katie and Wil.

Rick will come in tomorrow night. Tomorrow we'll do more
meet and greets starting with
breakfast at 0730 and our first interview at 0900. We'll work on the permits,
and get
people acclimated a bit to this time zone. Personally, I'm in time zone
hell. I woke up at
0215 this morning and have been going ever since.
I did find out that my great iPhone burns up airtime at $5.00 per minute
for all calls local
and long distance. And texting is expensive too. So, that's been turned
off. I think we'll
have a local Palauan phone shortly, courtesy of Jolie.
Our first interview will be tomorrow with Vince, the historian from Airai.
He showed us
some parts last year and he knows where there are a couple of airplanes
in the water
and on a small rock island. Now it gets interesting.
I hope all is well with you. More later as it develops.

PS It got more interesting. Molly and Warren took one of
the vans to get some Red
Rooster beer as a welcome to our arrivals. They couldn't find any. So,
just to create a
new tradition, we went back to Kraemers just to have one Red Rooster for
the new
arrivals. So who was there? A bunch of the Navy Divers including their
master diver.
And more, Wil Hylton knows all of them from his writing work on the B24.
It was old
home week for most, and let's meet you for the rest.
We have an invitation to the ship for a tour and looks like we'll take
advantage of that in
a day or so. If we had brought Red Rooster to the airport, we might not
have met up
with the divers quite so fast. The story just gets better and better.

Turns out Rick didn't make
in as scheduled. More on that in the next report...